Lord, Hear Our Prayer

Regarding the brazen attack on the religious freedom of all Catholics, and, indeed, of all Americans of any faith, including the freedom of atheists to be left alone (for is not the worship of secular idols just as insulting to you, my atheist friends, who despise worship, as it is to us, who despise idols?), and following by the insulting so-called accommodation proffered by an unrepentant administration, Fr. Frank Pavone and Priests for Life have asked us to pray. Here is a link to the page on his website. Here is the text (copy-and-pasted) from the aforementioned site:

Lord God, You are the Author of Life and Freedom. In your Spirit, we have the freedom of the children of God, And in your Name, we promote the freedom of all To seek, embrace, and live the truth of your Word.

In that freedom, Lord, we your people stand with Life And reject whatever destroys life Or distorts the meaning of human sexuality.

In that freedom, Lord, we your people live our lives In a way that advances your Kingdom of Life, And we refuse to cooperate in what is evil.

At this moment, therefore, when our government has decided To force us to cooperate in evil, We pray for the grace to be faithful to you And to oppose the unjust laws and mandates That have been imposed upon us and our institutions.

We pray for the conversion of those in civil authority Who fail to appreciate the demands of conscience. We pray for the complete reversal of all policies That permit the destruction of life Or coerce the cooperation of your people In practices that are wrong.

Bring us to a Culture of Life.

We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.

My comment: I really should post something about some interesting topic, like why Jack Vance is a finer SF author than Isaac Asimov, but the events of the day continue to draw my attention away from farthest stars and furthest futures to those quotidian matters.

The war against Tash and Sauron the Great and the Dark Eldil, or whatever name he is calling himself these days, in one sense is the central drama of all history: it is the very Ragnarok, the wars fought on the plains of Armageddon.

Here on earth we face his human puppets, who know not whom they serve or why, and it is like debating drunks, because sin darkens the mind and corrodes the soul, so that even matters of plain common sense are closed to them. The victims of vampire bites and lycanthropy are not less worthy of pity, since the soldiery of darkness cannot see the darkness for which they fight, nor see what the result will be.

The elfin lure of Utopia always draws them along and along, visions of sex without babies, food without fatness, willpower without any restraint in morals or logic. It is the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where neither the laws of cause and effect, nor the laws of economics, nor the laws of our forefathers have power any more, but only the omnipotent Leader on Earth, whose benevolence is superhuman.

An idea that stupid, an idol that fails and fails and slays its worshipers like Juggernaut, a mere daydream born of envy and arrogance with no logic to it at all is the lodestone that controls the souls of the modern mind: and yet they dare to call themselves the reality-based community.

It is an idea older than Marx, older than George Bernard Shaw, older than all those quaint and antique progressives of the Victorian Age and their little Darwinian excuses for eugenics and race-hatred. This musty old idea they dare call modern and up to date. Eternal truths the darlings of intellectual fashion dismiss as too ‘last season.’

Such be those arrayed against us. Yet God is for us.

In another sense this war is nothing, it is the vanity of evil, the presumption of lingering patch of dawn twilight against the rising of the sun, the vainglory of a void to be filled by an infinite sea.

We know the end of the tale, beloved sons and daughters of God. Python is slain by Apollo; Typhon by Jove; Tiamat by Marduk; Leviathan by Jehovah; and best of all, the slender heel of our mild queen and virgin shall crush the head of the lying snake who deceived all the poor children of Eve.

We shall prevail in this and in all wars, no matter how many battles we lose.

For this battle, comrades, we need not arms, which are weak things and toys, but prayers, which are the weapons of the angels, thrones, powers, and principalities of deepest heaven.

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.